AGA Today
Despite Steps,
Disaster Planning Still Shows Gaps
By ERIC LIPTON
New York Times
Published: August 26, 2006
WASHINGTON,
Aug. 25 — As Tropical Storm Beryl whipped up the seas along the
mid-Atlantic coast this summer, officials monitoring the storm inside
the Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters could watch both
sides of the action.
On one computer
monitor was the National Weather Service image of the storm, spinning
slowly toward New England. Nearby was FEMA’s high-tech counterpunch: a
digital map of the United States with a swarm of Pac-Man-like dots
representing FEMA trucks moving disaster relief supplies toward the
expected impact zone.
The tracking
system is a concrete sign of progress for an agency that, in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, became an international symbol of
dysfunction and incompetence. But the system is set up for only a sliver
of the country and includes just a fraction of the aid sent to the
field. It is emblematic of how inconsistent progress has been in
preparing the nation for disasters, one year after the hurricane and
five years after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
In the last
year, FEMA, the federal government’s primary disaster response agency
and overseer of state and local efforts, has adopted policies to help
prevent fraud and wasteful spending, strengthened its ties with other
federal agencies for help with evacuations and emergency medical aid and
installed high-tech equipment, like the supply-tracking system. After a
prolonged search, it hired a new director, R. David Paulison, a former
chief of the Miami-Dade Fire Department, and significantly built up its
executive ranks with more seasoned emergency managers.
Despite calls
by many FEMA critics, though, little has fundamentally changed about the
agency itself, which still has less autonomy and power than it did in
the Clinton years and a budget for its core mission that has not
significantly increased.
The
inconsistencies are apparent elsewhere. Along the Gulf Coast and in
other locations struck by disaster, like New York City, important
advances have been made to prepare for the next catastrophe. In New
Orleans, extraordinary steps have been taken to care for the disabled,
the elderly and tens of thousands of others without cars if another
major hurricane arrives. In New York, city officials say, up to three
million people could be evacuated from coastal areas and 600,000
accommodated in shelters stocked with food and supplies.
But in large
chunks of the country, far more limited progress has been made to
prepare for catastrophe, a recent federal assessment concluded. The
Department of Homeland Security, FEMA’s parent agency, rated only 27
percent of the states and 10 percent of the cities evaluated as
adequately prepared “to cope with a catastrophic event.” Dallas,
Milwaukee, Oklahoma City and Philadelphia were among the low scorers.
In
Philadelphia, for example, emergency radio systems are not reliable
throughout city, plans to care for the elderly and the disabled are not
complete, shelter space is insufficient and contracts for emergency
supplies mostly do not exist — all lapses that contributed to the
debacle in New Orleans last year.
The uneven
preparation has left many emergency-response experts, including senior
Bush administration officials, uneasy.
“There is not a
governor nor major-city mayor in America who does not know that all eyes
will be watching them when the next major disaster occurs,” said George
W. Foresman, under secretary for preparedness at the Department of
Homeland Security. “But generally speaking, if you ask the question ‘Are
they ready?’ it is not where it needs to be. And that is the
understatement of the day.”
Mr. Paulison,
the FEMA director, acknowledged in a briefing this month that while
progress had been made, his agency had not finished the task of
retooling itself.
“We cannot let
the deaths and the suffering of those Katrina victims go in vain,” he
said. “We have to take those lessons learned and make sure that this
organization, primarily FEMA, but the entire federal government, is
capable of responding in a much more nimble and much more effective
way.”
Ready to Roll
At Camp
Beauregard, a Louisiana National Guard training ground far from the
vulnerable Gulf Coast, FEMA has set up a sprawling disaster depot. Load
after load of bottled water, ready-to-eat meals, cots, tarps, blankets
and sheets of plastic have been assembled this year, each movement of
goods tracked by FEMA’s new satellite system.
But instead of
holding the supplies at the centrally located camp as FEMA mostly did
last year, the agency distributed them across the state, to sites
including New Orleans and surrounding parishes hit hard by Hurricane
Katrina. With these and other stockpiles — at least twice the inventory
dispersed before the hurricane last August — FEMA officials say they
have enough supplies to care for one million people for a week.
“We have moved
the trailers by the hundreds,” said Garrison Martin, the FEMA manager of
the Camp Beauregard complex, watching as forklifts brought in more
goods. “We can meet the need if a disaster was to happen again.”
Mr. Martin and
other federal, state and local officials in Louisiana have a palpable
sense of urgency in preparing for another hurricane or other disaster.
They have pieced together a regional response plan that has few
precedents in American history.
Federal
officials say that if a major hurricane threatens the Louisiana coast
this year, they will be ready before the storm to help move up to 80,000
people by bus and 61,000 by plane or train — almost everyone in the
region without cars, including tourists. Federal and state officials
have also found shelters safely away from the coast for as many as
250,000 people. The Defense Department, at FEMA’s request, has
contracted with suppliers to deliver diesel fuel and gasoline in
hurricane-prone states for generators and vehicles along escape routes.
The Pentagon is
also prepared to step in and help with rescues, medical evacuations,
delivery of heavy equipment and road clearing, as well as to provide
15,000 to 20,000 active duty troops to maintain order and offer other
assistance. The Department of Transportation is even paying for 200
buses simply to sit in the Gulf region this summer, just in case they
are needed for evacuations.
The most
detailed planning involves caring for the sick, the elderly and the
disabled, for whom the government and institutional failures last year
proved most deadly.
After the
hurricane, residents of Maison Hospitalière, a nursing home off Bourbon
Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, had to wait four days in
the stifling heat until they were evacuated. Without air-conditioning,
the temperatures climbed so high that two residents died while waiting
for rescuers.
“Things will be
different this year,” said Andrew B. Sandler, the nursing home
administrator.
Now Mr. Sandler
has a contract with a bus company that vows it will honor an agreement
to move his residents if necessary, as well as a contract with a company
that manages three nursing homes inland to accept his residents. And if
his plans fall through, state and federal officials say they will step
in to take care of them.
Federal
officials know that some havoc would be inevitable in an evacuation of
New Orleans. But they are using every moment of this hurricane season to
prepare to deal with another storm.
“Every day we
have where we don’t have a hurricane, we will be able to take it a
little bit further,” said Gil H. Jamieson, who is coordinating FEMA’s
efforts along the Gulf Coast.
Untested in the Northeast
Dr. Harvey
Rubin’s expertise is in infectious diseases, not disaster management.
But from the top floor of a hospital at the University of Pennsylvania,
Dr. Rubin had no trouble pointing out where catastrophes could unfold in
Philadelphia.
To the south,
sandwiched among a residential neighborhood, the airport and three
sports complexes, is a giant Sunoco oil refinery. It processes a highly
flammable product and stores hundreds of thousands of pounds of hydrogen
fluoride, an extremely toxic chemical used to make high-octane fuels. If
the chemical was released into the air by an accident or a terrorist
act, a poisonous, ground-hugging cloud could threaten hundreds of
thousands of residents for miles away.
To the east,
behind office towers, are the city’s historic icons, the Liberty Bell
and Independence Hall; beyond them is the container-ship port. All are
considered possible terrorist targets.
Philadelphia is
not at high risk for a natural disaster, but like many other major
metropolitan areas, it is vulnerable to industrial accidents and
terrorist strikes. Yet when Mayor John F. Street ordered a review of how
prepared the city was for a major catastrophe, the results were far from
reassuring.
“We have done
well, luckily, with the typical disaster,” said Dr. Rubin, director of
the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Strategic Threat Analysis
and Response and co-chairman of the study. “But the big catastrophe — we
have not been tested. It would not be smooth.”
Evacuation
plans for the city, even if only part of it had to be cleared, are so
unspecific that even some agencies expected to play a critical role do
not know what to do, the report said.
The city, which
has 1.5 million residents, has few plans to evacuate the elderly or
people without cars. Stockpiles of food and supplies would be sufficient
for only about 15,000 residents, with few contracts arranged to quickly
bring in large amounts of additional supplies.
The police and
fire emergency radio communication systems are unreliable on the
underground sections of the city subway. The ambulance dispatching
system does not allow city rescue crews to communicate directly with
hospitals.
So little
thought, in fact, had gone into disaster planning that city officials
had not even set up antiterrorist traffic barriers around the police
headquarters, which also houses the 911 dispatch center. (Barriers have
recently been installed.)
Left to Fend for Itself
The findings,
issued in June, reflected conclusions reached the same month by the
Department of Homeland Security and last month by the United States
Conference of Mayors.
“Significant
weaknesses in evacuation planning are an area of profound concern,” the
department’s report said. The mayors’ conference report noted that
communications systems in 80 percent of the cities were not
sophisticated enough to allow all public safety and rescue workers to
talk to one another, a goal the study’s authors said would take on
average four years to achieve.
Some states,
including Florida, North Carolina and Texas, received decent grades in
the Homeland Security Department survey, largely because of the frequent
tests they face from hurricanes. Certain high-risk targets like
Washington and New York also did relatively well, thanks to steps taken
since 2001.
Some measures
FEMA has taken in the last year — like establishing federal
reconnaissance teams that can fly in and report back on conditions even
if local communications networks are knocked out — could compensate for
some of the preparedness lapses. FEMA has also doubled, to 200,000 a
day, its capacity to field telephone calls from victims who want to
register for financial aid.
Yet many
aspects of the enhanced federal response effort are limited to
particularly vulnerable areas, like southeastern Louisiana. Much of the
rest of the country would have to fend largely for itself after a
disaster until federal help could be mobilized, perhaps as much as 48 to
72 hours later. With most areas inadequately prepared, that could be
precarious, federal officials and emergency managers acknowledge.
“Time and
again, these factors exact a severe penalty in the midst of a crisis:
Precious time is consumed in the race to correct the misperceptions of
federal, state and local responders about roles, responsibilities and
actions,” the federal survey of states and cities warned. “The result is
uneven performance and repeated and costly operational miscues.”
Philadelphia
officials have been commended for producing such a blunt report that
identifies gaps in their preparedness. But for area residents like
Theresa Jones, who lives near the oil refinery, and Charlie Tomlinson,
who rides the subway, the city’s vulnerabilities are worrisome.
“If something
happens here, we are just cooked,” Ms. Jones said. “We will be fried
chicken.”
Pedro A. Ramos,
Philadelphia’s top administrative official, said residents should rest
assured that Philadelphia was moving energetically to fill the gaps in
its disaster plan.
“You never know
what you don’t know until you go looking for it,” Mr. Ramos said.
But as a subway
car pulled into an underground station near City Hall, Mr. Tomlinson
said he could not help but wonder why it had taken the city so long to
get serious about preparedness.
“You would have
thought that now that we are five years past Sept. 11 that someone would
have addressed this,” Mr. Tomlinson said. “It is a little scary.”